As melee, Empowered Monoliths feel like D4's launch-state Nightmare Dungeons (Feedback)

We are aware of, and have been discussing the eternal melee vs ranged debate internally. Ranged is generally able to push further for a number of reasons, mostly due to the intrinsic benefits of not being in melee range, haha. It’s a very complex matter, particularly when infinite scaling is involved, but we have certainly been discussing the topic of how ranged tends to pull ahead of melee at high corruption (about 600-800C~) as the unavoidable attacks for melee start becoming unsurvivable.

Generally for balance, we shoot for all reasonable builds to complete around 300C. Of course, different people set different goals for themselves, and may only consider clearing 1000C to be ‘viable’, but roughly 300 is what we shoot for. As far as I’m aware, Spellblade is capable of this with a number of builds. Of course, we do listen very closely to feedback, so if we get a bunch of feedback about the Spellblade falling behind other masteries, we will certainly bump it up in priority.

The polarity of one-shots from normal enemies is never fun, and can be a side effect of infinite scaling (eventually everything scales to a point of one-shots), but from what I was reading, it doesn’t sound like you’re that deep in corruption. In which case, more information about what you’re experiencing, what enemies, and so on can help a lot for both us, and other community members who may have tips and tricks.

Sometimes, you don’t think it be like it is, but it do.

Being in melee range (very close range) means you have less time to react to abilities as they connect sooner. Hard to beat math on that one. Though there’s certainly things we do such as making those more instant melee attacks weaker than ranged attacks, but with infinite scaling everything hits a point eventually.

It’s been a while since I’ve personally played Spellblade, though it’s certainly had its times being the meta leader, haha. Sometimes all it takes is a small tweak, or a single unique for something to go from obscurity to OP supermeta, or reverse. From a neutral balance standpoint, maybe other builds having an easier time getting to 300 and above is what we should be looking at, haha . Though of course, as I mentioned, it largely comes down to the feedback we get, and we’re listening!